Kenji Lopez-Alt is managing culinary director of Serious Eats, author of the James Beard Award-nominated column "The Food Lab," and a columnist for Cooking Light. His first book is The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science.
Robin Lubbock/WBUR
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Modern, domesticated rice comes in a range of colors, usually described as white, red and black. But collectors have never found black grains in more than a thousand samples of wild rice stored in gene banks. Now geneticists have traced this rare grain's origin and spread.
Courtesy of Takeshi Ebitani/Takuya Yamaguchi.
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"Probably females are better at accessing olfactory memories, but I don't know why," says Robert Bath, a wine and beverage studies professor at the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley. "Maybe men don't pay as much attention?"
Maria Fabrizio for NPR
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For 3-D food printers, chocolate is a good material to start with, because it's fairly simple to make it liquid inside the printer cartridge and solid once it drops out.
Courtesy of Smart Gastronomy Lab, University of Liège
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A cabbage butterfly caterpillar. For tens of millions of years, these critters have been in an evolutionary arms race with plants they munch on. The end result: "mustard oil bombs" that also explode with flavor when we humans harness them to make condiments.
Courtesy of Roger Meissen/Bond LSC
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A slice of pork belly, with a thick layer of fat. "If we confirm that fat is a basic taste quality, it's the equivalent of saying chartreuse is a primary color," Richard Mattes of Purdue University says. "It changes our basic understanding of what taste is."
Xiao He/Flickr
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